A fifteen year old girl who played in a marching band at President Obama’s inauguration was killed yesterday by gunfire.

According to NBC news, Hadiya Pendleton was standing in broad daylight with friends in an upscale neighborhood Chicago Park when a drive-by-shooter took aim, not likely at her. Yet the bullet that lodged in this young girl’s back wasn’t exactly a guided missile. She ran a few blocks (I wonder if she was running for the safety of her home?) before collapsing. She died shortly after in the hospital.

I look at her picture on my Facebook news feed, and I see my own teen daughter. I see a smart, fresh-faced honors student with her dreams before her (she would have gone to Paris this summer). And I cannot stop the tears for the senseless death of someone’s daughter, sister (her brother is 10), and friend.

My son was almost killed five years ago. He had just turned 18; it was his last year of high school. And he had a lethal problem: an older kid/drug dealer was out to harm him because my son had won a party brawl fist-fight weeks earlier

The kid approached my son in a dark alleyway outside of a teen house party, and with no warning, smashed an empty liquor bottle over my son’s head, slicing his face open.

As the second blow came, my son raised his arm to defend himself—the broken bottle sliced through the artery in his wrist. A friend used my son’s sock to create a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding until the ambulance arrived. Five hours of surgery later to rebuild the artery, my son was still alive. Today, he has the scars across his cheek and his arm, to remind himself of how lucky he is that the weapon of choice was a bottle.

Had his attacker shot him at close range, he would most certainly be dead.

That the USA, my North American neighbor, keeps company with these bad-boy countries is just plain insane.

And among the world’s 23 most wealthy western nations, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is almost 20 times that of the other 22. Twenty times!

If I have to hear that damn gun lover’s slogan ever again, I just might shoot somebody: Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People. Yes, of course, but it’s not nearly as easy to kill someone with your hands, a knife, a bottle or a baseball bat. Getting rid of guns (apparently there are enough guns floating around the USA to put a gun in the hands of every citizen) would mean less dead people. Period.

Case in point: Japan’s strategy to virtually eliminate gun deaths by outlawing almost all firearms has resulted in a death rate from gunfire of .07 per 100,000 people annually. Remember, the USA’s number is ten times that and these figures might be too low. According the Atlantic Journal:

In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally.

If you are like me, all these statistics start to run together, and as telling as they are, become a kind of boring mantra of what is wrong with guns. So to wake you back up, I’ll leave you with this shocking and ridiculous advertisement by the NRA folks. (If anyone can watch this and still think sanity prevails in the “gun rights” lobby, I salute their capacity for denial.)

In the meantime, while the USA sorts out its gun insanity with new Obama-lead attemps at gun control, I am just grateful to live in well-mannered Canada where guns are used to shoot bears and moose, not human beings.

About Lori Ann Lothian

Lori Ann Lothian is a spiritual revolutionary, divine magic maker and all-purpose scribe. Her articles on love, relationships, enlightenment and sex have appeared at Huffington Post, Good Men Project, Yoganonymous, Origin magazine, Better After 50, XO Jane and on her hit personal blog The Awakened Dreamer. She is also a senior editor at the online magazine, The Good Men Project, Lori Ann lives in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband and daughter, where she has learned to transcend the rain and surrender to mega doses of vitamin D. Tweet her at Twitter or friend her on Facebook at Facebook.

I hope your words spark a conversation, or at least some consideration, among those who oppose gun control. It will take more than new legislation to change the tide in this gun-loving society, and it's going to be a long, hard struggle for those of us who care so deeply about this issue. Terrible tragedy about Hadiya Pendleton … another sad, sad statistic.

Hi Helene. It's interesting that so much of what i write about is life-affirming material, sexuality at the forefront. But teen death from any cause just moves my muse everytime–last was Amanda Todd's suicide. Having almost lost my son when he was a teen, and having a teen daughter, means that I can't help but identify with the parents of Hadiya. Thanks for reaidng.

Great article. Sorry to hear about your son – glad he's only scarred and lived to tell the tale.
The most insane thing about this 'conversation' is that the solution to gun crime, in the eyes of many pro-gun lobbyists, is more guns!
I think the solution is to put all the people who love guns in one state, with all the guns. And, you know, let them shoot as much as they want!